Where Obama Is Losing Ground

The Pew Research Center for The People & The Press national survey released Wednesday joined a lengthening line of polls showing President Obama's approval rating sinking from its heights earlier this year back to levels closer to his actual vote in November 2008. In the election, Obama won 52.9 percent of the vote; Pew, echoing other recent findings, put his latest approval rating at 51 percent.

Like other surveys this summer (including the Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll), Pew found Obama's numbers are weakest among groups that were skeptical of him last year, but appeared to be kicking the tires on him during the honeymoon stage of his presidency. Now those groups--particularly white men without a college education--are retreating rapidly amid the ideologically polarizing debates over health care, the stimulus and his administration's overall trajectory.

But Pew's new survey also records perceptible, if still generally
modest, erosion among groups that were central to Obama's coalition
last year--including young people, college-educated white women and
even partisan Democrats. That is more worrisome for Obama, especially
amid signs that the bruising combat over his health care plan is
inflaming the conservative base. If conservatives are energized at the
same time that Obama's core supporters are wavering, Democrats could
face a withering differential in turnout during next year's election,
many party strategists fear.

The chart below compares Obama's
approval rating in the July and August Pew surveys with his vote last
November, according to exit polls, among groups that supported him then
and others that resisted him.

*Hispanic rating unavailable for July 2009 Pew survey; figure from Pew's June 2009 survey.Sources:
Edison/Mitofsky National Election Pool Exit Poll 2008; Pew Research
Center for the People & The Press surveys July 22-26, 2009 and
August 11-17, 2009.

As the health care debate has exploded this
summer, Obama's ratings have declined the most among the group that was
always the most skeptical of him--white men without a college
education. At 35 percent, his approval rating among those men has now
sunk below his performance with them last November, and converged with
their meager support for the last two losing Democratic presidential
nominees--Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.

Obama's
numbers with the "waitress moms"--white women without a college
education--are also slipping back toward his 2008 vote level, which was
itself lower than the Democratic showing among them in three of the
previous five presidential elections. Figures provided by Pew's Jocelyn
Kiley show that from Obama's Pew highpoint in April, when his overall
approval rating hit 63 percent, the president has dropped a daunting 12
percentage points among the waitress moms and 11 points among the
non-college men.

This erosion among non-college whites could
threaten Democrats in 2010, particularly across the Rustbelt states of
the Midwest, if turnout among these voters remains strong. But over the
long run, those voters are not central to Obama's coalition, in part
because they have been reliably Republican in presidential elections
since the 1980s, and partly because they are steadily declining as a
share of the electorate.

More important to Obama are
college-educated white voters, the key to his dramatic and decisive
gains last year in suburban counties from Fairfax, Virginia to
Arapahoe, Colorado. On this front, the picture is somewhat brighter for
him: he maintains majority support among college-educated white women
(who gave him 52 percent of their vote last year, matching the
Democratic high in recent decades) and his approval rating among
college-educated white men still exceeds his (admittedly lackluster)
vote with them last year. But with both groups, he is moving in the
wrong direction: Obama's approval rating among the upscale men dropped
two points in the Pew survey from July to August, and his standing with
the college-plus white women dropped a more ominous five percentage
points. (Compared to his April Pew highpoint, Obama is down seven
percentage points with college men, and eight with college women, so
his decline hasn't been as steep as among the working-class whites.)
Socially liberal and generally open to government activism,
college-educated women are the Democrats' strongest remaining allies
among whites; they are a group Obama really cannot afford to alienate.

The
slippage among college-educated whites also helps explain Obama's
troubles with independent voters, another more troublesome trend for
him. All of the most recent national surveys have placed his approval
rating among independents below 50 percent, although his positive
ratings with them still generally exceed his negative marks.

The
NBC/Wall Street Journal national survey also released this week offers
some insight into that decline. It found that just 31 percent of
independents now approve of Obama's handling of health care, while 54
percent disapprove, according to crosstabs from the poll provided by
Public Opinion Strategies, one of the pollsters. Asked their view of
Obama's health care plan, just 28 percent of independents said they
consider it a good idea, while 43 percent described it as a bad idea,
and the rest said they didn't know.

Yet when the pollsters read
a description of the Obama proposal to respondents, the attitude among
independents sharply shifted. Opposition among them remained roughly
the same at 44 percent. But support jumped to a 52 percent majority.
The gap between potential and actual support for Obama's plan among
independents suggests two things: that the White House is losing the
struggle to define the plan so far, and that they may have room to
increase their support if they can regain the initiative.

Obama
faces a formidable gap between potential and actual support even among
Democrats in the NBC/WSJ poll. Just 62 percent of Democrats described
his plan as a good idea; but after hearing the explanation, 78 percent
of them said they would support it. (Even among Republicans, support
jumped from just 9 percent to 23 percent when they were provided a
description of the plan.)

As the prospects for bipartisan
agreement in the Senate fade, the need for Obama to unify Democrats
will increase. Right now, though, he is losing Democrats from both
wings of the party, even as independents soften and conservatives
mobilize. Obama's ratings in the Pew survey declined slightly from July
to August among moderate Democrats (down two percentage points) and
sharply among liberal Democrats (down nine percentage points).

These
poll numbers suggest that health care is becoming the classic issue
that wounds a president: one that unites his opponents and divides his
own side. Obama probably has little hope of changing the first half of
that equation; when Congress returns he'll probably need to focus more
on improving the second.

Ronald Brownstein, a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of presidential campaigns, is Atlantic Media's editorial director for strategic partnerships, in charge of long-term editorial strategy. He also writes a weekly column and regularly contributes other pieces for the National Journal, contributes to Quartz, and The Atlantic, and coordinates political coverage and activities across publications produced by Atlantic Media.